This week we talk to Mishka Shubaly

Our guest today is author Mishka Shubalay. After receiving an MFA from Columbia University, Mishka promptly quit writing to play music. He lived out of a Toyota minivan for a year, touring nonstop, and has shared the stage with artists like The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Decemberists.

His Kindle Singles for Amazon have all been bestsellers. He writes true stories about drink, drugs, disasters, desire, deception and their aftermath. The Long Run is Mishka’s mini-memoir and details his transformation from alcoholic drug abuser to sober ultrarunner. His latest Kindle single is called Of Mice and Me and details him finding an orphaned baby mouse and the life lessons it brought to him.

Also at the end of the interview we have a pre-release of a song from Mishka’s forthcoming record.

 In This Interview Mishka and I Discuss...

The One You Feed parable.

Watching the wolves battle since he was a kid.

Nihilism and self defeating behaviors.

How he celebrated his 5 years of sobriety.

The ebb and flow of life.

Remembering and forgetting our life lessons.

How running is his meditation and prayer

Doing the hard thing and embracing the challenges remind him that he wants to be alive.

 How its harder to train for six weeks than to run 10 miles at once.

 That smaller changes can be more difficult to maintain.

Changing the default posture of our mind.

How his mantra went from Fuck It to Try Every Day.

Success being built on a series of failures.

Learning to recover from our mistakes

Extending the benefit of doubt to ourselves.

The negative voice of the bad wolf.

How we won't recover from addiction unless it is the most important thing in the world.

His fear of AA.

How there are no magic bullets.

His public promise to attend an AA meeting.

How it's worth trying anything once, expect maybe crystal meth.

Our communal desire for having a lot of pain over a long period of time versus a brief intense pain.

How following our dreams is not always the right approach.

Playing music for the love of it.

How the only thing that makes us happy is happiness.

How getting everything we want doesn't always make us happy.

Posting a picture of the The Strokes guitar player's ass all across Manhattan.

Mishka Shubaly Links

Mishka Shubaly Homepage 

Misha Shubaly Amazon Author page

Mishka Shubaly on Twitter

Of Mice and Me

The Long Run

Beat The Devil

 

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